6K WORDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The next chapter is going to be the same length,
Chapter 103: The Space-Time Bloodline Exposed, The Strongest Technique
Locating the Five-Tails jinchuriki was not difficult.
A jinchuriki had one defining characteristic: a chakra reserve that stretched like an ocean in every direction.
The moment a Byakugan user brought their long-range penetrating vision to bear, a jinchuriki in the field stood out the way a floodlight stood out among candle flames. Every other chakra presence in the area simply ceased to matter.
Whether Han had already received Stone Village's intelligence on the dispersed squad formations, or whether several days of hunting on Danzo's frontline had convinced him that nobody here could match him, the Five-Tails jinchuriki had not bothered to hide himself at any point. He moved openly across the battlefield, hunting down the small squads Danzo had split apart, and he attacked each one the same way: directly, violently, without preamble.
It was the quintessential fighting style of a taijutsu specialist.
And that bluntly straightforward approach had proven completely unworkable against him. Every ninjutsu was either dodged through raw speed or shattered against the tailed beast chakra cloak enveloping his body. Kunai with explosive tags attached, blades coated in nature transformation, none of it could puncture that red outer shell.
Steam poured from every part of Han's body, accompanied by a low resonant roar from somewhere within, like a locomotive building to full pressure. Anyone the locomotive hit had already ceased to exist before they touched the ground, their body destroyed beyond recognition. Some of the deaths were worse than that, internal organs forced out through the impact and scattered somewhere far away.
Even those who managed to dodge the direct strike and were only grazed by the steam came away with large patches of severe burns. Without immediate treatment those wounds became infected easily, leaving the affected ninja operating at reduced capacity for extended periods.
This was why jinchuriki inspired the fear they did across every nation.
What Han was currently using was only the second stage of jinchuriki power, different from the first stage where tailed beast chakra leaked out uncontrolled and undermined the host's rational thinking. Above this second stage came the third, partial tailed beast transformation, which turned the host into something that couldn't distinguish ally from enemy, a being of terrifying strength running entirely on instinct. Above that was the fourth, complete tailed beast transformation, producing one of the shinobi world's largest and most destructive entities, with defensive and offensive capability to match, and the ability to fire a Tailed Beast Ball that could level several mountains in a single shot. That was the definition of a nightmare made physical.
Having this kind of monstrous power while always being one emotional trigger away from losing control and killing your own comrades made a jinchuriki an inherently alienating presence within any military force. Especially during the earliest stage, when tailed beast chakra leaked involuntarily, the host typically lost control at some point while still in the village. One villager seeing it meant every villager knowing. Then it wasn't just other ninja who kept their distance. Civilians despised them too.
This was why jinchuriki occupied such an awkward position in every village. The nations depended on them and instinctively recoiled from them at the same time.
Growing up in that environment shaped most jinchuriki into people who were sensitive, withdrawn, and difficult to approach. Han was no exception.
Despite being one of Iwagakure's ace combatants, he held no command position on the Stone frontline. He had entered this engagement as a surprise weapon and had been operating alone the entire time. No Stone ninja fought alongside him. The only people in the field with him were the concealed reconnaissance squads and ANBU watching from positions he couldn't easily reach.
On this particular day, Han was hunting alone as usual.
"Buy them time! Everyone scatter and run!"
"Captain!"
"Move. That's an order."
"Understood!"
In a stretch of dense forest, rare in the Land of Rain, a Konoha squad was in full retreat, their expressions a mix of terror and grim resolve.
At their captain's sharp command, the three younger ninja bit down on their reluctance and vanished with Body Flicker.
The sound rose from a distance and grew louder. Low and resonant, like a train building steam.
Just hearing it made the Konoha captain's hands shake. But he set his jaw, drew a kunai from his tools pouch, and held his ground.
In the next moment, the image that filled his eyes was nightmare made real.
A red meteor trailing white smoke was hurtling toward him with a shriek of displaced air. Looking closer, it wasn't a meteor at all. It was a figure wrapped entirely in translucent red chakra, steam pouring from every surface, moving with a sound somewhere between a whistle and a sonic boom, everything in its path simply smashed aside.
The large trees in front of it snapped and fell one after another. The display of raw force made the sight even more imposing than it might have been otherwise.
Knowing it was useless, the Konoha ninja threw it anyway. Kunai after kunai with explosive tags flew toward that oncoming shape. He brought his hands together and forced a stream of high-temperature flame from his mouth in a direct line, hitting the figure head on.
Neither the explosions nor the fire drew so much as a scratch. Not only was the translucent red tailed beast cloak absorbing everything with powerful defensive force, the roiling steam surrounding Han's body formed a second layer of armor on top of it. Double protection, one inside the other.
Watching every attack get ignored as that shape bore down on him, the Konoha ninja's eyes filled with despair.
Then the sound of a thousand birds screaming in concert tore through the forest.
Before the captain could locate where it was coming from, a blue-white lance of light stabbed downward from the top of one of the trees, aimed directly at Han.
The lance moved like an arrow released at a stationary target, hitting the Five-Tails jinchuriki instantly.
But the penetrating sound that followed was wrong. It was the treetop beneath Han's feet that had been pierced and cut away. A white cloud of dispersing steam hung in the air where Han had been, resembling nothing so much as a shadow clone being destroyed.
In reality Han had burst outward with even more explosive speed, clearing the lance's path in a fraction of a second.
The Konoha captain recognized the technique from intelligence that had spread across the entire shinobi world. A surge of relief broke through the despair in his eyes and a name came out before he'd consciously decided to say it. "Lord Yoru!"
A voice answered from right beside his ear and made him flinch.
"Get out of here. I won't be able to look after you when fighting."
"Understood!"
Looking at Yoru, who had appeared beside him without any sound or warning, the captain answered through a voice that trembled slightly and vanished with Body Flicker.
Yoru swept his gaze across the forest, which had gone quiet except for the rain. He entered Black Lightning Mode. Black and white electrical arcs rippled across his body and chakra, ready at any moment to channel what the shinobi world had labeled Storm Release Black Lightning.
Han still hadn't reappeared. Yoru held his chakra blade in one hand and raised the other, extending a single finger in the Ram seal, one of the twelve hand seals.
With his talent elevated a second time and his chakra control at a level entirely his own, single-handed seals and abbreviated seals were trivial for Yoru now. The most obvious demonstration of that was his Chidori and Chidori Sharp Spear, which required no hand seals at all. His version of Chidori was also different from Kakashi Hatake's. He condensed a mass of chakra in his hand directly, then poured nature transformation and shape transformation into it, as though gripping a bolt of lightning and reshaping it at will. The later-era Sasuke Uchiha and Kakashi had both reached this same level with the technique.
The one thing Yoru still couldn't do was release a sensing technique without any seals at all. If he could, his already uncomfortable-to-fight combination would become something else entirely.
Holding the one-handed Ram seal, Yoru extended his sensing ability, which had improved considerably over two months of research and training but still couldn't be called exceptional.
Sensing worked similarly to genjutsu in its foundation. Both were Yin Release chakra, produced by fusing spiritual energy with chakra and releasing it outward. Genjutsu pushed that invisible energy through the five senses into a target's brain and manipulated the chakra woven through the brain's neural pathways. Basic sensing, by contrast, spread the Yin Release chakra outward like an invisible net cast to the full extent it could reach, and anything with chakra or a life signature caught in that net instantly revealed its position to the user.
Like any fundamental technique, sensing could be developed into more specialized extensions. Yoru's current limitation was that he hadn't yet managed to develop his own extension of it. He was still using the foundational version. He had the beginnings of an idea about how to do it, and obtaining the Spiritization Technique had been his first step toward filling that gap. But the difficulty was extreme. Even with twice-upgraded talent, it would likely take a long time before he built something that was truly his own.
The moment his sensing extended outward, a white signal line flashed through his awareness like an instinct firing.
His eyes dropped downward.
A crack spread across the ground directly below him.
Then a figure exploded up through the earth, body wrapped in translucent red chakra and trailing white steam, launching toward Yoru like a living cannonball.
Anyone else would not have had time to respond.
Even the previous year's Yoru, with only one evolution's worth of talent enhancement, would have had no choice but to use Flying Thunder God to escape.
Now, Yoru not only had time to respond, he had time to identify the precise opening and act on it. He coated his chakra blade in black and white current and drew it in a single stroke that looked almost casual. Unhurried.
The tailed beast cloak and steam armor that had been shrugging off explosive tags, weapon strikes, and even Fire Release jutsu from armored ninja without pause, met Yoru's blade and didn't even produce the sound of fabric tearing.
There was only a single flash of black and white, and then Han, war armor, tailed beast cloak, steam armor and all, was cleanly bisected from top to bottom.
The cut surfaces were so smooth and straight they might have been drawn with a ruler.
This was what happened to a taijutsu fighter who faced Yoru. Unless their speed matched his or exceeded it, a taijutsu specialist who needed to close distance to use their full power had no answer for Dimensional Slash regardless of how overwhelming their offense was or how impenetrable their defense. Jinchuriki or not, Third Raikage's ultimate shield or not, any of them caught by it were finished.
But Storm Release Black Lightning had been circulating as intelligence across every nation for some time now. Its properties were well documented, as were Yoru's Lightning Release ninjutsu taijutsu. Both had become part of what people expected when they faced him.
Would a full ace combatant really walk into something like that?
Yoru didn't believe it for a moment.
As expected.
Both halves of Han's body dissolved into white smoke simultaneously.
Then a sun-bright radiance flooded across the entire left side of Yoru's vision.
He turned his head. Bearing down on him was an enormous beam, more than a hundred times the volume of his Laser Beam, a high-density mass of chakra energy moving at incomprehensible speed, its trajectory leaving an impression of pure light rather than matter in motion.
The same principle as Han's shadow clone bursting from underground, where the combination of tailed beast cloak and steam propulsion made it impossible for most people to react in time. This beam operated on the same logic.
By the time Yoru registered it, it already filled his entire field of vision.
His neural reaction speed bought him the fraction of a second he needed. He read the beam's trajectory, predicted where it would impact, and raised his chakra blade with the flat of the blade facing it.
The beam struck the blade.
The terrifying force it carried did not move the blade by even a hair. Instead, like a block of soft material hitting a perfectly sharp edge, the beam divided itself cleanly in two at a speed visible to the naked eye, both halves streaming past Yoru on either side.
The explosions that followed rang out like two thunderstrokes overlapping. Brilliant light blazed from behind and then forward. Viewed from above, two enormous beams of light had carved a V-shape through the forest, punching all the way through to the other side of the tree line. Everything within their path, plant, tree, and animal alike, had ceased to exist. Any ninja caught within that path would have met the same fate.
When the light faded, two massive gouges lay across the forest floor.
Yoru glanced at them, and his pupils contracted slightly.
He already knew the power of a partial Tailed Beast Ball. But knowing about it and watching it carve twin channels through a forest were two different experiences.
A partial Tailed Beast Ball was, in simple terms, a miniature version of the real thing. Certain enthusiasts had taken to calling it a hollow dog cannon, though the name was unofficial. A true Tailed Beast Ball was the size of a tailed beast's head, traveled at staggering speed, and detonated with enough force to instantly level several mountains. It was an S-rank technique with the widest area of effect and highest destructive output available, and that status would hold as long as no one at the transcendent six paths level was in the field. Using one required complete tailed beast transformation. A jinchuriki in partial transformation could fire a reduced version, but the power drop was significant.
Even so, had Yoru not split the shot, that partial Tailed Beast Ball would have punched through the entire forest and carved a substantially larger wound in the earth. A mountain in its path would likely have been penetrated or destroyed outright.
If the weakened version was already this devastating, the full-power release was a different category of destruction entirely.
This kind of wide-area ultimate technique was exactly what Yoru's current arsenal lacked, and it also represented a threshold he was working toward. When the energy he could gather inside his body, whether regular chakra or Space-Time chakra, could be condensed into a sphere on the level of the final technique he had named for a gift of parting, it would mark the moment his evolutions had carried him beyond the demigod tier. His combat power and his strategic deterrence would both reach a new dimension entirely.
The crack of earth splitting reached him again.
Two enormous chakra arms, red and translucent, burst from the ground the same way Han's shadow clone had, fists driving toward Yoru's position from both sides.
Yoru's figure vanished without a sound. The arms hammered through the space where he had been and shattered the tree above.
Moving silently through the forest, Yoru's gaze passed between the trees and settled on Han, standing below one of them with both hands buried in the ground. He had entered partial tailed beast transformation. Five great tails swayed behind him.
Han seemed to sense Yoru's gaze. He raised his head and their eyes met across the distance. Then he opened his jaw wide and released a roar that shook the air.
The sound wave hit the atmosphere and twisted it, creating a cyclone that expanded outward. Every tree caught in its path was uprooted where it stood. The invisible wall of wind was stronger than most standard Wind Release techniques.
And that was from nothing more than the roar of a jinchuriki in partial transformation. The same kind of roar, from Naruto Uzumaki in a similar state, had been enough to finish Kabuto Yakushi in an instant in the original story.
Yoru had no interest in standing in the way of an invisible wind wall, nor any need to.
He held the chakra blade in one hand and extended his index finger on the other hand. A small black-red orb condensed at the fingertip.
The orb became a Laser Beam and launched toward Han at a speed that exceeded the partial Tailed Beast Ball.
The invisible wind wall ceased to exist in front of it. Not even the sound of a pin being pushed through a balloon broke the silence.
The explosion that followed rang out like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. Black-red radiance bloomed where Han had been standing, without raising a single thread of smoke, without scattering a fragment of stone.
Because the black-red light was similar in color to the translucent red of partial tailed beast transformation, with only the intensity between them being different, it wasn't immediately clear whether Han had been hit.
Yoru didn't bother looking at the spot. He raised his eyes to the sky instead.
Up in the rain-grey air above the forest, a black-red figure hung suspended in mid-leap, five enormous tails swaying behind it. Han, in partial tailed beast transformation, had somehow already put himself airborne.
He was apparently worried that Yoru would spot him there and fire another Laser Beam. The moment Han's shape appeared in the sky, his body began spinning at high speed, steam erupting in all directions with a train-whistle shriek, and he dropped into the forest like a falling meteor, deliberately landing at a distance from where Yoru was standing.
He clearly knew a direct collision wasn't going to hurt Yoru.
The impact shook the ground. A shockwave of displaced air flipped everything on the forest floor over. Under normal circumstances, an impact force like that would have thrown up a mushroom cloud visible for kilometers.
Instead, for some reason, the enormous dust cloud that rose didn't climb. It spread along the ground surface like the white mist of a Hidden Mist technique, rolling outward in every direction, swallowing everything at ground level.
The storm and the expanding dust fog swallowed Yoru where he stood in the distance.
A dust cloud of this density and coverage was beyond Yoru's current ability to disperse.
But he wasn't even slightly concerned.
In his normal state, entering full intangibility required a moment of preparation. Against any opponent, that was reason enough for caution.
In Black Lightning Mode, his Space-Time chakra and Lightning Release chakra were interwoven and circulating throughout his body. Going fully intangible was a thought, nothing more.
In this state, Yoru's composure was the same composure Obito Uchiha had carried when he faced all five Kage. As long as the opponent had no Space-Time abilities of their own, he could toy with them at will. Even when he couldn't break through and couldn't deliver a killing blow, he could walk away with perfect composure. And if a clean one-hit kill opportunity appeared, he wouldn't hesitate to take it.
Kushina hadn't grown into her full strength yet, which meant the tailed beast strategy wasn't in motion. Jinchuriki could be killed freely right now. The tailed beasts themselves would simply revive.
"What an absurd level of power."
With both feet adhered to a branch that was shaking violently in the shockwave, Yoru couldn't see anything through the dust fog. But he could imagine what the area around Han's landing point looked like. There was certainly a crater down there now.
A jinchuriki in partial transformation could throw out a roar that counted as a high-tier Wind Release technique, and the destructive radius of every individual attack was something that far exceeded even Tsunade's monstrous punches in scale.
Maintaining rational thought and full mobility in that state was what made someone the shinobi world's greatest taijutsu power. The Eight-Tails jinchuriki Killer B was exactly that kind of existence.
Yoru couldn't imagine what it would look like when Kushina Uzumaki could use tailed beast chakra to summon a giant arm and throw a punch with that same monstrous physical force behind it. What he could say with certainty was that Yoru himself, without his Space-Time ability, would be killed without question by a single hit. Outside of other jinchuriki, there probably weren't many shinobi who could survive one of those punches.
With his vision completely cut off, Yoru had no choice but to work through sensing.
Keeping intangibility readied as a defensive response in case Han fired another partial Tailed Beast Ball, Yoru extended his sensing outward and began moving.
His expression shifted slightly.
The enormous, violent mass of chakra he had been tracking was gone.
What remained were several chakra signatures at roughly the same level as the burst-from-underground attack Han had used.
The most likely explanation was that Han had dropped out of partial transformation back to his base state and created several shadow clones before reentering partial transformation, positioning himself somewhere outside the range of Yoru's sensing. Or he had simply gone back to base state, made the clones, and stayed there, letting the clones draw Yoru's attention.
Either way, it didn't bother Yoru. Han moving this way actually suited him perfectly. It was exactly the kind of environment that would let him train his sensing ability.
Yoru let the crackling of a thousand birds fill his body, then launched himself through the fog as a streak of black and white.
He held his chakra blade in one hand and maintained the Ram seal with the other, tracking the movement and change of every chakra signature around him.
As he closed on one of the signatures, it suddenly extended a faint thread outward in his sensing.
A shape materialized from the grey dust: an enormous translucent red palm swinging down toward him from above.
His form flickered out of existence without a sound. Before the giant hand could complete its strike, it dissolved into a white cloud.
Han's shadow clone vanished along with it.
Sensing was genuinely Yoru's weakest point. A dust cloud of this area and density did limit his effectiveness. But if his sensing continued to improve, this kind of environment would become his territory too.
He cut the clone down without slowing and launched himself toward the next signature.
Then, without warning, something in Yoru's sensing triggered a change in his expression.
A blinding white light blazed from nowhere into the middle of the dust fog.
The grey cloud vanished entirely.
What had caused it was a translucent white cube expanding at a speed that even Yoru couldn't respond to. By the time he registered it, he was already inside.
The cube had no inside. Everything it contained was reduced to atoms. The dust, the ground beneath his feet, every tree that had been standing nearby, all of it was gone, broken down below the threshold of visibility.
Everything except Yoru.
Floating in the air, eyes wide beneath an expression of undisguised shock, was a small old man.
The same silence had settled over Han, who had emerged from the dust on the other side and was staring at the scene.
The translucent white cube of Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World Technique, which had expanded with the speed it was named for, had surrounded Yoru and contained him completely. The dust and earth and wood around him had been reduced to atoms.
Yoru was unharmed.
The cube faded. Neither Onoki nor Han had returned to themselves yet. Their expressions moved only toward greater disbelief.
Because they could see that the Yoru in front of them was not a will-less projection. He was not a shadow clone with finite endurance. He carried chakra, and Lightning Release nature transformation played freely across his entire body.
He was the real body.
This meant the ambush tactic they had designed specifically around Yoru's sensing weakness, including the Onoki shadow clone that had been stored in a special sealed scroll with enough chakra to fire one use of Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World Technique, had not failed. The translucent white cube had successfully enveloped Yoru at a speed that even Flying Thunder God could not have countered. Dust Release, a Kekkei Tota born from three simultaneous nature transformations and transcending ordinary bloodline limits, a technique that could disintegrate Wood Release, Susanoo, and even the ultimate shield that had survived a direct Tailed Beast Ball without a scratch, had hit its mark.
It had simply accomplished nothing.
Dust Release had earned its reputation for eliminating every bloodline limit it encountered. That reputation was justified. But Yoru had been hit by it and stood completely unharmed.
That wasn't a defense. Nothing defensive could survive what Dust Release did to matter. In the face of a force that unmade physical objects entirely, even the strongest armor was kindling.
If it wasn't defense, it was a special ability. One that caused a body to stop belonging to the category of physical objects.
Onoki ran through every piece of known intelligence on Yoru while staring at him: the mastery of Flying Thunder God at such a young age, the photograph of fifty-five dead Sand ninja spread across ground covered in Flying Thunder God seals, the black meteor that had severed the salamander's tail during an earlier engagement, the ability to conceal his chakra presence so completely that even sensing techniques could not detect him, and the moment just witnessed. An older man of his accumulated experience and observation had arrived at a bold conclusion, and the only thing stopping him from committing to it had been that it was too frightening to accept without certainty.
Because if the guess was right, it meant the shinobi world was about to produce a figure more dangerous than even the First Hokage.
Wood Release that had shaped an era, Mangekyou Sharingan, Dust Release that decomposed all things down to their base atoms: none of it would matter against Yoru.
Yoru, who had very nearly been killed just now, was reassembling his thinking as well. His expression was not quite right.
He had fallen into a cognitive trap.
He looked up at Onoki, who should have been in Iwagakure right now, and spoke with certainty. "So your actual target was me all along."
Everyone had assumed it. Hiruzen Sarutobi, Danzo Shimura, Orochimaru and the rest on the White Fang's frontline, and Yoru himself. The assumption was that Stone Village had deployed their jinchuriki ahead of Sand Village's decision as a strategic signal, a way of telling the Third Kazekage that Iwagakure would stand alongside him and split Konoha's attention across both fronts.
What none of them had anticipated was that Onoki had anticipated that assumption, and planned around it. He had selected the Five-Tails with his Boil Release rather than the Four-Tails with his Lava Release specifically because Boil Release steam created a density of fog that was difficult to see through, which would force Yoru to rely on a sensing ability that was his acknowledged weakness. Then Onoki himself had arrived concealed inside one of Han's shadow clone formations, waiting for the right moment to emerge and fire Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World Technique.
If Yoru hadn't been in Black Lightning Mode, and hadn't been able to go fully intangible in a single thought from that state, he would have died.
After Hanzo of the Salamander, one of this era's foremost powers had delivered a lesson that cut just as deep.
He had not expected this.
While Onoki was still in that moment of stunned hesitation, Yoru raised his hand, extended his finger, and began condensing a black-red orb at its tip.
Onoki watched the orb take shape. He saw it. The core was blue-white energy, very similar to the Rasengan in the intelligence files. Then something that was not Storm Release changed the color. The blue-white current inside the energy ball shifted to black lightning. It was as though a specific nature transformation had been poured into it.
That nature transformation was not Storm Release.
He ran through everything he'd seen and everything he knew. The whole picture assembled with merciless clarity.
"That isn't Storm Release Black Lightning," Onoki called out, voice sharp, turning toward Han. "What this kid has is Space-Time Release. Han, quickly—"
The last word never left his mouth. The Laser Beam punched through his chest.
Onoki looked down at the hole, its edges as clean as the ones left in the mountain face when Hanzo had been shot. No burn marks. No scorch. Just absence.
"So it truly is a Space-Time bloodline," he murmured.
Then he vanished in a cloud of white smoke.
Watching the smoke disperse, Yoru thought of something. The chunin exams in the original story. Iruka Umino's shadow clone appearing from inside the Heaven and Earth scroll.
He understood now how Onoki had gotten here.
He glanced at Han, whose chakra was pulling rapidly away from him through the dust at a speed that said everything about his intentions, then put the chakra blade away and formed the seals for two shadow clones.
The first clone erupted with blue-white Lightning Release chakra, the shriek of a thousand birds screaming from it, and dove into the dust fog.
The second used Earth Body Flicker to disappear underground.
Yoru formed another seal. The Yin Seals both released.
The diamond seal mark beneath his bangs began to shine as the chakra pressure lifted the hair away from his forehead, and dark lines spread outward from it across his face, forming a pattern that resembled a tattoo. The combination of those markings and his ice-blue eyes, already cold at the best of times, gave his expression a quality that sat somewhere between dangerous and otherworldly. A similar mark was present on his chest beneath his clothing, visible only to those who knew to look.
Both his regular chakra and his black chakra surged upward at once.
He raised his right hand and extended his index finger.
The black-red orb condensed at the tip. This time it was several times larger than the marble-sized point of light he had fired before.
A Byakugan user watching from kilometers away would see nothing unusual. Space-Time chakra carried inherent high-dimensional shielding that made it invisible to ordinary sensing techniques. Otherwise they would have witnessed both blue and black chakra flowing through his pathways toward his right hand, pouring through the fingertip into the forming orb, its density climbing with every passing second.
At that same moment, in Iwagakure's Tsuchikage office, Onoki absorbed the shadow clone's memories. He was on his feet immediately, voice carrying full authority. "Prepare Reverse Summoning. Get the reconnaissance squads and ANBU to cover Han's evacuation."
Kitsuchi startled at his father's intensity and answered in a voice that came out higher than intended. "Yes, right away!"
Han was already moving. Using his Boil Release to generate an explosive burst at the boiling point, he accelerated out of the dust fog at a speed comparable to a fired cannonball, each touch of Body Flicker fast enough to shatter the treetops and ground beneath him. His Body Flicker was among the very best in the shinobi world.
But speed was not enough when the things you were running from were lightning and Space-Time.
A kunai wrapped in Lightning Release nature transformation flew out of the dust with a crack of displaced air.
Yoru's first shadow clone appeared at the same moment, and with a neural reaction speed that bordered on impossibility, snatched the still-flying kunai out of the air and hurled it upward into the sky.
The second shadow clone, which had been underground using Earth Body Flicker to track through sensing, materialized in the air above. It caught the Flying Thunder God kunai and flung it downward into the forest ahead of Han.
The clone appeared once more an instant before the kunai hit, catching it and placing it gently on a treetop.
The next instant, Yoru's real body teleported to the clone's position.
The high-density black-red orb at his fingertip became a beam.
But unlike the compact Laser Beam that exploded on impact, this one expanded as it left his finger. It grew as it moved, becoming a massive black-red column of light that tore through the forest in near-silence.
The expansion form. The diffusion form. The version that didn't compress to detonate, but widened outward like a wave.
Its speed left the partial Tailed Beast Ball behind without effort. Everything the column touched was unmade on contact. The sturdy trees in its path couldn't slow it for even a hundredth of a second.
Han pushed everything he had into a sideways dodge, burning Boil Release to generate one final explosive burst of speed. He barely cleared the light cannon's initial path.
And then it turned toward him.
He was airborne. He had nowhere to go.
He had not believed a beam that size could change direction. He watched it move anyway, watched it cross the distance between them and fill his vision from left to right.
There was no pain. There was only black-red light flooding everything, and then nothing.
From the perspective of the reconnaissance squads and ANBU who had been watching from concealment by whatever means they possessed, what they saw was Han's upper body cease to exist the instant the column touched it. No explosion, no shockwave, no visible debris. It was simply gone, atomized, in the same way Dust Release unmade things but with none of the accompanying sound or blast.
Yoru steered the column downward, directing it the way he would guide Chidori Sharp Spear, and Han's lower body followed the same way.
The column met the ground. It left behind a massive incline carved into the earth, descending into darkness, with no explosion sound and no scattered stones.
The Light Cannon. The full-power form of the Laser Beam, the expansion and diffusion variant.
In terms of principle it was close to Chidori Sharp Spear. It could be controlled and redirected after firing. But unlike its compressed, explosive counterpart, this form consumed an enormous amount of both regular chakra and Space-Time chakra, enough that releasing both Yin Seals and draining both reserves to near-empty was required to fire even one shot. The current version was roughly half a person's size in diameter. The complete form, sized to a full human figure, was what Yoru had developed as the dedicated answer for Ten-Tails jinchuriki and six paths-level opponents. Even a person with the unkillable body of a Ten-Tails jinchuriki, hit by it, would be unmade instantly.
This was Yoru's current strongest technique.
Several minutes later, in Iwagakure.
Kitsuchi's face had gone white. His voice was barely controlled. "Father... Han... is dead."
Onoki's expression turned to iron. His teeth pressed together.
"We were still one step too late."
***
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